Review: WHAT WE LOOK LIKE at DOBAMA

Dobama's premiere, WHAT WE LOOK LIKE, is often fun, but inconsistent, and needs focus and cutting

Roy Berko

It's always exciting and challenging to see a "new" play script come alive in a staged production, especially by a creditable performance company. WHAT WE LOOK LIKE, now being presented at Dobama, CLE's self-proclaimed off-Broadway company, is a case in point.

Written by B. J. Tindal (they/them) a Black queer playwright, the script had its inaugural production at Oberlin College in February of 2019.

It is a 155 minute-play with intermission (ignore the notation in the printed program, if you get one, which states, "This play will be performed with no intermission.")

Billed as, "Both hilarious and poignant, WHAT WE LOOK LIKE is the story of the Hodges - a black family that has recently moved to a suburban white neighborhood. When the youngest son is asked to draw a family portrait at school, he creates an imaginary white family and the Hodges are thrown into a spiral."

Playwright BJ Tindal says, "It's about images of family and how race intersects with that and the pressures it puts on family units."

Tindal had an interesting path to become a playwright. At Oberlin, he had his hopes set on majoring in creative writing. When he didn't get into the required intro-level course his first semester, the aspiring playwright enrolled instead in an African American Drama course.

"Even though the department doesn't have a playwriting concentration, the class influenced his decision to pursue theater and sparked the inspiration for a play that would help Tindal launch his career. The script was WHAT WE LOOK LIKE, a play he developed his first year at Oberlin."

The play grapples with ideas of what a family is supposed to look like and how that can be damaging for some and beneficial for others. Tindal explains. "It's about images of family and how race intersects with that and the pressures it puts on family units."

WHAT WE LOOK LIKE premiered in the fall of 2014, Tindal's junior year. It was presented again in spring 2015 during Commencement/Reunion Weekend. It now gets what is being called "The Professional World Premier" at Dobama.

The Dobama staging, under the direction of Darius J. Stubbs, does an adequate job of creating as good a production as possible with the often unfocused and overly long script.

The show starts off with great promise with a dual play going on in the same acting space. The black family is realistically portrayed and the white family is presented in "Father Knows Best" and "The Brady Bunch" stylized sit-com over-exaggerated to perfection. This format quickly disappears and we get a multi-topic tale of parental confusion, over-done teen-age angst and unrequited love, a tip of the toe into lesbianism, a contrast between white and black child rearing, an unrealistic tale of a child shuttled between two families with one set of parents unaware of the action, the revealing of why the black child drew himself as part of a white family and a "last supper" that includes overdone revealing of the entire convoluted plot.

At times the script, which needs much dramaturgy work of red pencil crossing out of extraneous scenes and unnecessary plot twists, is funny, other times it creates situations, such as the over-done black son's infatuation with the white girl next door, and "stupid dad" segments, and bogs down.

The cast, Aamar-Malik Culbreth, Diwe Augustin-Glave, Rob Grant III, Alexa Fatheringham, Katricemonee Headd, Katie Booze-Mooney and Andrew Gorell all basically develop the character(s) they portray. Several, however, have difficulty projecting so they can be heard, carrying on "inside-voice" conversations, rather than thrusting his/her voice to the furthest corners of the space.

Vocal projection is especially important in the poorly configured Dobama long-thin stage where voices don't carry well to start with and those seated in the extreme stage right and left seats miss much of the dialogue. (I could just hear the ghost of Donald Bianchi, the theater's perfectionistic founder, screaming, from the last row, "I can't hear you," his epic admonishment to an actor who failed to project.)

Capsule judgement: Often with plays of new playwrights, over-complicated plots, over-done premises, and the need for extensive cutting waters down the effect of the premise. This is the case with WHAT WE LOOK LIKE. The Dobama staging, under the direction of Darius J. Stubbs, does an adequate job of creating as good a production as possible with the often unfocused and overly-long script.

WHAT WE LOOK LIKE runs through May 14, 2023. For tickets: call 216.932.3396 or go to https://www.dobama.org/

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